Unofficial ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ Logline Offers A Little Tease

There are six officially confirmed Marvel Studios productions underway, that together form “Phase Two” of the Marvel cinematic universe. Five of the six have a director, the one that does not is Guardians of the Galaxy.

Outside of concept art that confirms the core roster of Guardians of the Galaxy, a release date and a new screenwriter, little is known about what stories from Marvel Comics the film adaptation will draw from as it paves the way for The Avengers 2 the following summer. If this morning’s release of a logline about the film is anything to go by, we may at least have a vague idea of the film’s synopsis.

Production Weekly and The Grid both shared the following one-line description of Guardians of the Galaxy that may offer our first idea of what to expect from Guardians of the Galaxy.

About a U.S. pilot who ends up in space in the middle of a universal conflict and goes on the run with futuristic ex-cons who have something everyone wants.

In its simplest form, it’s referring to the history of Star-Lord (think space cop), the central character on the team, but we can confirm that it’s not something officially released by Disney/Marvel. Perhaps that’s for the best since this logline alone sounds awfully too similar to last year’s Green Lantern and that’s not a good thing.

If it were authentic though, the U.S. pilot mentioned is either Peter Quill or Vance “Astro” Astrovik from the comics. Quill is Star-Lord but earned that title by forcefully taking the place of another astronaut. He’s not the most likable guy at first. Astro on the other hand, was actually in the airforce in the comics, but goes by the name Major Victory in the books after travelling forward and back in time (his younger self in the timeline goes by the codename Justice). It’s Astro (also a teammate) who inspires Quill and his team to adopt the name Guardians of the Galaxy.

The history of Guardians of the Galaxy however, is rather convoluted with its stop-start history, multiple timelines (and alternate realities) and varied intergalactic characters. From the “ex-con” description (the Guardians are not ex-criminals), it’s a safe bet that there will be changes made in adapting what’s canon from Marvel Comics to the silver screen and those two characters could be swapped or merged.

The most interesting part of the description is the “something everyone wants” part which we can assume refers to one of the very special artifacts found in Odin’s vault on Asgard (as seen in Thor). It’s either the Tesseract (Cosmic Cube) – the elusive MacGuffin featured in Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers – or, in direct reference to Thanos, it’s the Infinity Gauntlet – the all-powerful glove that can destroy the galaxy. A key part of Thanos’ comics is him acquiring the gems to put together the Gauntlet where he then erased half of the universe to impress Death (the personified version of Death as name-dropped in The Avengers mid-credits scene).

Stay tuned for officialGuardians of the Galaxy news sooner rather than later as we’ll be following it very closely here at Screen Rant. For now, tell us what you’d like to see in Guardians and what other characters should appear (Adam Warlock, Nova, etc.).

Iron Man 3 releases May 3, 2013, Thor: The Dark World on November 8, 2013, Captain America: The Winter Soldier on April 4, 2014, Guardians of the Galaxy on August 1, 2014 and The Avengers 2 on May 1, 2015.

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I thought it was a medicore film. I thought all the actors did good and the special effects were good. The issues were that the story and romance were overly-predictable, it felt like the film’s tone was ripping off the “Iron Man” approach, both the villains were terrible, and the writing was bad. I think DC took a major blow with that. I’m interested to see if they make a sequel or just reboot it. I always thought Reynolds would make a better Flash, and the John Stewart arc, to me, has always been more interesting.

Fair points dude, I kinda like it as a brainless, pretty action film. You know the type, just got in from a rubbish day at work, can’t be asked to concentrate on anything too taxing so slap on a CG film with a can of beer!

But it’s defo not up there with DC’s / WB’s best – and I think they’ve gone from strength to strength in recent years.

She got kidnapped one time too many, Mario was getting tired of it and decided to dispose of her to save him the hassle of travelling across 7, sometimes 8 worlds to get her back – just to get kidnapped AGAIN!

Green Lantern was not that bad. Granted, it had some faults…too much dumb humor, as GL (Hal Jordan) was actually rather a serious hero (most, not all, of the time, in the early comics); and we did not need a bedroom scene in there. The dialogue was kind of weak, and he needed his white gloves (personal piccadillo). But overall, it was a much-needed film to introduce this great and “Marvel-less” hero, and now that we got past the wobbly introduction, it was frankly a darned good first attempt. So now we got past that, let’s do the next Lantern movie with Ryan Reynolds as Hal, vs Sinestro, which we all want to see, and let’s do it right, since we now know where the weak spots were. One of it’s biggest faults actually was with shallow jerky “bandwagon-critics” who called themselves disgruntled fans, and spread so much hogwash that they all but killed the franchise (I am not totally sure they didn’t; hopefully there are still a few brave souls at DC who will push onward and upward). DC is gonna fold if it keep relying on trotting out the same old tired stuff like Superman and Batman, none of which have been much good thus far. If I were DC, I would pour heart and soul into the Green Lantern franchise, doing at least a couple more movies. I would get a Flash movie out. I would actually do a team-up movie with Dr. Fate (Kent Nelson) and Hourman (Rex Tyler). And then look at possibly a team-up movie with Green Lantern and Flash, followed by another team-up movie with, say, Hawkman, The Atom, and Martian Manhunter. By this time we would have a pretty good idea of where to go with a Justice League Movie, plus we would have a “universe” for DC characters a little more established. Now to do this before all of us who remember the comics are so old and grey we crumble into dust, DC needs to fast-track it, two or three movies a year. They are gonna have to spend some big all-or-nothing-at-all bucks in a mega-effort to move Heaven and Earth to re-establish and also get to the JLA movie. That means thinking big, thinking expensive (cuz let’s be realistic, that is what it’s gonna take), I am talking great writers/plot/directors/actors/special effects/producers…the whole shot. Half-hearted efforts will garner only half-hearted results. Are we in for a penny, or in for a pound? Flash has amazing potential (a side-note: stick with Barry Allen), and Green Lantern certainly does as well, being the best DC hero for a multiple-movie franchise. So let’s “Git ‘er done”!!

Guardians of the Galaxy is the kind of film that will either be extremely awesome or completely terrible. With the film’s ridiculous premise and characters, I can’t see it being a film where we can go, “Well, at least it was okay.” It’s either going to be loads of fun or ridiculously stupid. Hopefully, the script, director, and cast play it well.

Star wars was models at first which was great for its time. when chi came into place it was already an established series and mite I add the huge cgi ones are TERRIBLE. GoG should be an animated movie since all of it has to be chi anyways.

@trey, I always thought that GOG should be a CGI movie too but now I understand why Marvel Studios is doing it because there is a void there that Marvel wants to fill with them in it since Star Wars is over, but it also ties into The Avengers at the same time through Thanos.

Hopefully Star Lord will be the main character. He’s definitly my favorite Guardian. Thanos should be the main villain. By this time he should already have the Infinity Gauntlet after, say the Thor 2 post credit scene or cameo? Then maybe he has to aquire the gems which maybe some of the Guardians have? I know that does’nt happen in the comics but for film I can see it. Then he starts extinguishing stars and then threatens the galaxy. Then Avengers 2.

“Perhaps that’s for the best since this logline alone sounds awfully too similar to last year’s Green Lantern and that’s not a good thing.”

To be fair, that is not the reason why GL failed. If fact if it HAD followed that outline (and stayed out in space) the movie would have been much better. So GotG can still use the base concept and succeed where GL failed.

And I would be disappointed if both Adam Warlock and Quasar/Martyr were also not part of the cast.

I will be surprised if Adam Warlock isn’t in the movie. Quasar is another story. you kind of need to introduce the kree (which they can do easily) before bringing her in. my guess is theyre leaving her out to avoid any controversy about her sexuality, and if the first movie is popular they’ll bring her and maybe Moondragon into the sequel

Things can simply be omitted or outright changed to avoid any complicated backstory. It’s not as if they haven’t done it before. They also have the option to make them male or female (two female leads would be unprecedented!) and go by other names like Martyr instead of Quasar.

And you are suffering from what I will call, “association syndrome”. Disney did that with John Carter and the lengths they went through to remove “Mars” because of the bad “Mars needs Mom” association was just plain getting carried away and over thinking the situation.

That description is so vague it could be reworked to match numerous movies/TV shows. Hell, replace “U.S.Pilot” with “kid” and you have the plot for Star Wars!

So lets not go all “Question” over one poorly constructed and overly simplistic description.

@Mongoose, I laughed so hard about how Disney was so afraid of the association with “Mars” but the movie still failed. Taking Mars out of it obviously had no baring BUT a name like “John Carter” is so generic and potentially misleading that they hurt themselves by over thinking in the wrong direction. “John Carter and the(____) of Mars” sounds better but the title still wasn’t the main problem.

Still, this description (whether it’s true or false) does sound eerily similar to the Green Lantern story. GotG could, and probably will end up being better than GL, but the fact remains that it sounds a bit too much like the plot synopsis of that movie – and that might not sit well with some people…

I for one am taking this news with a grain of salt though. Until an official synopsis is released, I’m not gonna read too much into things…

If they stayed in space and still had the other Lanterns seem lost it would not have helped the story much. As someone who never followed the Green Lantern Corps. at all, they seemed to be more interested in building the Hal Jordan character up as some savior that did someone thousands of aliens with more experience couldn’t figure out. Not another one of those races had propulsion systems where they are from?

Green Lantern just had a script that was an afterthought, and just putting something in space doesn’t make it cool or interesting.

I’ve said this before but the biggest problem with GL was they felt the need to keep the story centered around Earth. For some reason Hollywood doesn’t think we can relate to a bunch of aliens. This meant they had to fabricate implausibilities like Parallax infecting Hammond so they could keep the villain at home and turning the “fearless” Hal Jordan into a doubting and angsty idiot so he would return to Earth. Cut the Earth crap out of the equation (after Hal gets the ring and takes off to Oa) and it would have been a markedly better. More time to train, explore the GL Corps and characters and have a villain focused on Oa.

If they had used the “Gl:First Flight” script from the animated show, it would have both made sense and use the CORRECT reason for the origins of the yellow ring.

There WILL however always be the craptastic mask and outfit but you can’t have everything.

The decision not to have the whole movie in space probably had as much to do with money as anything else. Considering they spent 200 million and change as is and got the results they did, I really can’t imagine what more CGI and visual effects would have cost. What worked in the animated series probably was effective because they can represent what a comic book looks like as close as you can get without spending a half a billion dollars to do live action.

The problem with the space movie genre is that there has been Star Wars, Star Trek and then everything else. The original Star Wars movies were done in a different time using practical effects and came across in a different way then the newer prequels did. Star Trek through out it’s history really has never depended on CGI as much (so far) and kept it’s depiction of aliens at a high level.

This new found ability to use computers has been liberating in some ways, but the cost and reality that it can still look like cheesy animation pasted into live film is still an issue. At some point when technology becomes more available the quality of what it can do goes up and the price usually goes down. A movie like Green Lantern cost more than the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies did from a decade ago and don’t look any better.

As someone who has followed both of the series of GOG. I enjoyed the original Gaudians series, but the latest version actually made for better story lines, and that mainly had to do with Marvel rebooting their “Cosmic line” a few years back. Marvel did an excellent job of pulling their characters in to one cohesive universe. I also think that Star Lords Character is a stronger character then Vance Astro. Plus, we already have a Captain America, and Vance is way to big of a fan boy early on in his growth as a hero. I’d like to see their first movie a little bit of the forming of the team, which would lead into directly into their hunting down Thanos in Avengers 2. The Core of the team should lead them to Drax and Gamora, both who have reasons to go after Thanos. This should be handled with more of a Starwars, then a Green Lantern. Peter Quills story doesnt need much said about it , it can be played in a Flash back or a Soul Gem insight when he meets Warlock.

The big difference between this and GL will probably be how little earth is involved….which is where Green Lantern really failed. Had Hal just stayed on Oa and not run home crying….it could have been a much better film.

Star lord definetly seems to be the lead, but this will be very much a star wars esque (new hope) team…except everyone is kinda Han Solo. And the simple fact that is more of a team focus will help GotG not be Green lantern I think. Quill will help ground it but the rest of the team will really steal the show if done correctly.

I can’t wait to here more about this, especially casting and who will be in the director’s chair.

I still believe that Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios are simply doing this movie, as opposed to the Black Panther, because they want to stick it to Warner Bros. by giving us Marvel’s version of The Green Lantern Corps.

the only problem here is the guardians weren’t in the infinity gauntlet saga. drax and gamora were but not as part of the guardians. i will be pissed if they don’t do thanos and the IG saga justice. I’m sure thats why marvel was trying to get galactus and surfer back since they were key players in the IG saga

I believe that GotG will set up TA2 but won’t directly involve the guardians, the IFG saga from what I’ve read seems like a solo trilogy piece… They MAY be able to squeeze it ibut it would be over stepping, by the reactions I’ve seen from Thanos fans.

I have a hunch guardians will be rubbish. I mean, a talking tree and a space ranger racoon? C’mon, that is Disney kiddie flick fantasy stuff. Marvel will regret this film, and it will set them back quite a ways, diminishing all their other properties affiliated with that universe. Do not do this film!

@Gildilocks, I remember seeing so many people talking crap about EACH film about how they won’t work and will flop etc and YOU were one of them. ESPECIALLY THE AVENGERS. BUT each movie turned out to be a success, yes even The Incredible Hulk. Not saying this can’t flop cuz anything is possible but Marvel KNOWS this is “THE” riskiest idea but MUST be wanting to risk this for a VERY good reason. Coming off of the heels of The Avengers, and the next movies that will more than likely be successful, I see this as worth the gamble that will have a MAJOR payoff.

People won’t be comparing this to the Green Lantern concept. GL has a magical ring, while these guys are using guns. GL was compared to “the last Starfighter” but nobody gave that much mind. It could be compared to SW with a “innocent” character thrust into a larger battle. But ultimately, this sort of idea has been used forever.

GL was pretty terrible IMO. It seemed like a lazy movie that producers threw money, stars, and a name director at. But nobody is going to connect the GotG concept with GL.

And everyone comparing this concept to Star Wars should think about the illustrious history of movies that are touted as “the new Star Wars.” I’m not saying it will be a bad movie, but I’m not ready to say it’ll be great. I expect this to be decent. Marvel has proven they can carefully debut far-out concepts. They won’t make a “game changer.”

“A U.S. pilot who ends up in space in the middle of a universal conflict.” Why does this sound like Buck Rogers?

I would love to see Nathan Fillion as Star-Lord (or as Buck Rogers in another movie). He should fit into the Star-Lord role comfortably because of his role on Firefly/Serenity. He looks the age, he looks like Quill and he knows how to work with Whedon because of their work on Firefly/Serenity. All he needs to do is slap on a cyborg eye and he’s ready to start his wise mouth crackin’.

I’m pumped to see what they do with Drax. Can’t wait to see him destroy and annihilate!

I am really looking forward to GoTG. Probably more so than any other Marvel movie coming out. It’s different. Plus is paves the way for Avengers 2. People say they are tired of the same old comic book story lines. Well this one is different. I hope the direction and cast can give justice to the book.

I don’t care what anyone else thinks, besides Avengers 2, GOTG is the Marvel movie I most look forward to. I think it’ll really help bring the Thanos storyline together and help establish the Marvel universe as one of the most interesting since the old Star Wars movies… if they do it right.

After doing some light research, a Guradians of the Galaxy movie can def work and be good. Chronicles of Narnia had talking animals but the story was grounded with real emmotions despite all the fantastical elements.

GotG should emmulate IronMan’s tone. It was gritty, dark at times and humerous. Marvel’s best balanced movie. GotG can def work IF (a very big if) Marvel plays it right with a unique story, balanced tone and avoiding superhero clichés.

I actually didn’t say anything positive or negative about GotG, other than I rather a Black Panther movie, which i still do. The biggest thing this movie has against is Marvel’s typical movie tone and repetitive formula.

Ok, now Marvel needs to bring in a great Black female actress for one of the roles of one of the lead female characters, Gamora maybe. There is still a HUGE lack of diversity AND NO LOVE FOR BLACK WOMEN in these Marvel Studios movies. (Fox’s Storm doesn’t count, so don’t mention her).

That would be fine since she is from an alien race with green skin (might even look better with a dark brown skin base). Of course you might get a certain percentage thinking this is a cop out just like casting DC’s MM with a black guy but I say too bad 😛

I just don’t know how they are going to handle her background because it is WAY too weird and convoluted to be used, “as is”. I mean will she start out working for Thanos and then rebel against him or start out after that has happened? I could go on and on with the questions……just thinking about her history makes my head hurt.

@Mongoose, I think that’s the uniqueness about her story and relationship with Thanos, he was sort of a stern father figure but not a good guy. She was sort of like a mob boss’s daughter, he’s not a good guy but if anybody did anything to his daughter…..That’s one of the things that is also unique about Thanos as a villain, he’s not your cookie cutter type villain that just wants to take over the universe it’s deeper than that but he did it and basically defeated himself. But yeah Gamora’s story is deep but I’d probably leave out her getting raped, maybe almost but not have it actually happen. She is a badass though. Nobody has mentioned “Pip”, do you think he should be in this at some point?

-According to The Hollywood Reporter, Marvel has reportedly selected Super’s James Gunn to direct the Guardians of the Galaxy movie. No deal is set at this time, but the word is that Marvel likes Gunn’s sensibility and his ability to mix comedy elements with action and horror. They feel that this is a quality he shares with Avengers director Joss Whedon

Peyton Reed Bring it On and Ryan Fleck Half Nelson were also in the running or the job.

Great news there, Joss Whedon will also be there to consult. Rocket Racoon will be a BIG costume sale. Even though the thought of it is kinda cheesy, I see a lot of toy sales too, but then again there were and still are countless Star Wars toys.